


death of the author, grandeur of the fandom

by InsufferableArchanist



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, gryffindor has north sandy bunny and jack so god bless, i was debating making pitch a ravenclaw but then my ravenclaw friend burned me so bad, if the possibility for this ridiculous shadow man to be smooched doesn't exist what's the point, just let pitch be a slytherin, ravenclaw has toothiana, slytherin has pitch, so the order of operations is, there were skin grafts and everything i'm just a sentient pile of ash, typing this to you now as a warning, ya'll she smote me i was submitted to the icu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:15:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28563384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsufferableArchanist/pseuds/InsufferableArchanist
Summary: a hogwarts au where our guardians (and pitch) are students that find themselves in the most deplorable of circumstances: detention. toothiana is interested in a deeper connection they all possess.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	death of the author, grandeur of the fandom

**Author's Note:**

> for the rotg secret santa 2020. #45: "A ROTG Hogwarts AU crossover maybe?"
> 
> j/k/r is dead to me and we're having fun with this universe. also magic users have plumbing that shit's been around since like the middle ages MA'AM.

“So…” Tooth began, “Does anyone want to talk about it?”

Around her, the group of disgruntled young men paused. It had been a while since they’d been abandoned to a small patch of land just off of the Forbidden Forest, and for the most part, they’d been digging for the better part of an hour in surly, curmudgeonly silence. 

“...What’s there to talk about,” Jack replied at last, not so much a question as a challenge. The kind of thing that had Tooth throwing her spade down into the dirt, making a solid slicing noise that made the boys around her look up in her direction.

“Well we could start,” she said, “With how we, specifically, all ended up in detention the first week of school. It doesn’t exactly seem random to me. Aster? Pitch?”

Jack snickered.

“Okay, your name is Pitch Black?”

“Hang on it, _Frost_.” Pitch replied, plunging his own spade into the dirt before straightening up. He flexed his hands, the pads of them sore. He knew his back would be worse the next morning. 

“Well,” North said, “Perhaps you can focus on destroying the Slytherin common rooms next time you pick fight, eh, Jack? Not fight Bunny?” 

“Oh, comma’ - You just called me Bunny, for the love of all that’s good!” Bunnymund objected.

“Is your name, yes? You do not call me Nicholas St North.”

“Yeah, Aster,” Jack snickered.

When Bunnymund started in towards Jack, a slippery ribbon of magic like golden sand wove its way between the two of them like a dividing line, and both boys had to look sheepishly over at Sandy.

“Sorry about that, Sandy,” North said, patting their fellow Gryffindor on his shoulder. “Anyway, he is right. We should not be dividing ourselves like this. It does not matter who started the fight-”

“For the record, I’m pretty sure it was Bunny throwing most of the curses -”

“Curses?” Tooth asked.

Aster looked away and sniffed, then scrunched his nose. The effect was rather like a rabbit, even if it was on a boy who looked to be nearing six feet. 

“Just a couple friendly ones -”

“There aren’t any friendly curses,” Pitch interjected. “That’s why they’re called curses.”

“Otherwise, they’d be charms!” Toothiana quipped happily, before registering the nonplussed expression on Jack and Aster’s faces. “...Well, they would be.”

Sandy sighed and rubbed his temples. As he closed his eyes, the stream of gold he had produced before illuminated a scene for Tooth and Pitch: the Gryffindor common room, with its warm hearth and lush furniture, the students happily chatting away and sated by their dinner. Then, there was a ping, a flash, and an explosion of movement. They watched a few students hop around, some start rolling along the floor like errant soft boiled eggs; all the while, Jack seemed to be leaping around the room.

Figures that were clearly North and Sandy tried to intervene; North wrestled Aster to the ground, while Sandy managed to trip Jack up without even trying.

“...So you managed to land yourself, your opponent, and two completely innocent bystanders in detention. Impressive,” Pitch said flatly. Neither Jack nor Bunny could decide whether they should be more offended.

“As if you ended up here for better reasons,” Aster huffed, standing up to his full height in Pitch’s face. 

Pitch looked, as always, rather unimpressed.

“My reasons are my own. I don’t owe you an explanation.”

North laughed and clapped Pitch on the back, making his lithe frame wobble in the darkness of the night. “Oh, come on Pitch! We air our dirty laundry with you -” 

“Technically, that was _my_ dirty laundry,” Jack started.

“- And you share with us! It pays to have friends, no?”

Pitch’s lips were curled as he looked warily from North’s large hand up to his face, then back again. Pinching North’s forefinger between two of his own, he removed the offending limb from his personage before he opened his mouth to speak.

“...For what it’s worth, I’d tell them,” Tooth said with a small smile.

A smile directed at Pitch. At the snake in their midst.

The gaggle of Gryffindors gawped at the dark boy and Tooth, unaware of who to be more shocked by. 

“It was sweet of you. In a stupid way,” Tooth told Pitch, who had begun to flush at the ears a little.

“Well now you have to tell us,” Jack said.

Pitch made a noise of exasperation. 

“I challenged one of my classmates to a duel, and I won. _Soundly_.” he said, hands twisting on the handle of his spade. “...He said something uncharitable about Toothiana and myself during a shared class.”

“He called us freaks, Pitch. Muttbloods, which I didn’t even know was a thing -”

“I don’t think it was until fairly recently,” Pitch told Tooth, looking just a little more tired for it. “Either way, it was just as much for myself as for you. Hardly chivalrous.”

Toothiana smiled. 

“You told him to be grateful I was too gracious to fight someone over my pride,” she said. 

Jack felt like his jaw was about to fall off of his face. Sandy very gently pushed up on his tip-toes and shut both his and Aster’s mouths to stop them from gawping at the scene of Pitch trying to deflect praise and attention. 

“It seems to me the only way to explain it. I know… There are more comments about you that circulate in my range of hearing, certainly,” Pitch said. “You are… Notable.”

“What can I say? I’m a celebration of color.”

“...Sooo….Does that mean I’m allowed to ask about the feathers?” Jack said, after a nauseating moment of watching what he thought might be genuine fondness wash over Pitch’s visage. When it soured, and Tooth looked from Pitch to himself, all seemed more right with the world.

“Am I allowed to ask about your albinism?” Tooth asked him, nudging forward, under and upwards so that she was right in his personal space.

When Jack flushed, she laughed, and distanced herself again a little. Shaking off her school robe, she revealed two shimmering wings that matched the crest of feathers peaking up from her brown skin.

“My mother was a siren,” she explained. In the chill of the night air, she put her robe back on, but the excitable hum of her wings beneath it was now noticeable. Now that they all knew it was there. “I have her nose, too! Isn’t it cute?”

“Yes,” Aster, Jack, North, and Pitch all replied. Sandy gave her two thumbs up.

“So… That explains people being weird about you, but… Well. I mean, is that like. A skin condition or something?” Jack asked Pitch, who looked about as pleased as if he’d bitten into an unripe persimmon.

“You know, Frost, I could just bury you here with the lunaloopsilas.”

“Right. But like… What’s your _deal,_ first?”

Pitch crossed his arms, straightening back up.

“My _deal_ is that I am a wizard, Jack Frost. I don’t have an explanation for much else, and I don’t see why I should need one,” Pitch told him, a frown creasing between his brow. 

“...Y’ don’t know who your parents are, mate?” Aster asked him, his voice softer than it had been since he’d arrived at Hogwarts. It only seemed to increase Pitch’s irritation.

“For all I care, two dementors spawned me in an eldritch chasm of godlessness and mystery, and here I stand before you tonight,” Pitch spat. “I am not _fragile_ , and I have nothing to prove to anyone.”

“...I think what Bunny tries to say is that it is hard, being alone. I know this,” North said. He almost replaced his hand on Pitch’s shoulder, but rethought the gesture as Pitch’s eyes shifted towards him, glinting from soft silver to bright gold as the light passed across them.

The golden ribbon of Sandy’s magic passed between the ragged circle they’d made in the field, twining into their shapes. Then, as if a thread had pulled a piece of fabric into a bunch, they were together. Tooth clapped her hands.

“That’s just what I was saying!” she exclaimed.

When Jack and Aster looked at each other, confused, the image reformed into links of a chain. The meaning still eluded Jack.

“Okay, okay, okay… I mean. I get it. Pitch looks weird, Tooth - well, Tooth, you’re not - you don’t look weird, I mean I probably look weirder than you-”

“Smooth,” Aster told him.

Jack casually smacked him in the shin with his spade as he stretched. 

“What I’m saying,” he clarified, “Is I don’t… I mean, four of us are Gryffindors, sure. That sort of works for us. Same year, and all. But it might be hard for a Slytherin to be seen associating with us, don’t you think?”

“...You presume a Slytherin would want to be seen associating with you,” Pitch told him. “I gather North is an orphan, from his statement, and his tattoos suggest some rather… Harsh magical binding at a young age. Sanderson is practically an animated font of magic who doesn’t even need a wand. What are you, Frost?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s the sob story that’s going to bind us together as bosom companions?” Pitch asked him.

It was clear that Tooth, North, and Sandy were all interested in his answer, and even Aster gradually stopped trying to struggle out of Sandy’s restraint to get at Jack when he picked up on the situation. It all made Jack want to take Pitch up on the offer to be buried alive, but he simply motioned backwards.

“Why not ask Aster his deal?”

Pitch Black did not possess any more eyebrow hair than he did pigment in his skin tone, but he quirked a brow nonetheless. 

“He’s part rabbit, Jack. That doesn’t take much explaining.”

“It’s _Pooka,_ ya bleedin -”

“I can go back to ‘bunny’, if that would suit you better,” Pitch said, without looking away from Jack’s face. Aster fell silent with a huff, and Jack was left to squirm under Pitch’s gaze.

He threw his hands up.

“Okay! So I’m pale! What do you want from me?” Jack exclaimed.

“We’re sharing, Jack,” Pitch said. 

Sandy rattled the gold chain. When Pitch and Jack continued to stare each other down, they found themselves entangled in it, pressed chest to chest, and practically cheek to cheek.

Jack had sucked in a breath, expecting - 

Expecting…

“You’re cold,” he said, one hand pressed against Pitch’s chest. Even between the layers of his uniform, he could feel it; he could feel that their bodies were almost evenly matched. The others stood silent around them as Jack looked up at Pitch’s face, as unaware as a boy could be that another person’s mouth was so close to his own.

The chain loosened, but he stayed where he was, and Pitch - Pitch stayed bent a little towards him, almost seemingly entranced as Jack’s pale hand touched his face. He noticed, suddenly, the violent lack of pigment in his own skin. Tooth’s had seemed so vibrant when she’d been next to him.

“Actually, _you’re_ cold,” Pitch said, at last. “I’m… Cool.”

“Yeah, you hang onto that hope,” Aster said.

Like that, the spell was broken; Jack couldn’t help but laugh, and where he laughed, others followed. He could swear he even saw Pitch smile, a little bit.

“So, you’re cold and pale. Vampire?” Pitch asked.

Jack shook his head. 

“I don’t think so. I don’t… Really remember a lot either, though.”

“Maybe we can figure it out together! Oooh! _A GROUP research project_!” Tooth said excitedly.

“Yep. You’re a Ravenclaw alright…”

“You bet your buttons I am!” Toothiana said proudly. “How else do you think I figured out we were all linked?”

Aster’s nose wriggled.

“Y’mean… You reckon someone.... Jack and I were fighting-”

“But North and Sandy just tried to stop you, right?” Toothiana said. “I’m telling you, there are larger forces at hand. People who don’t think of us as people. We’ve got to stick together!”

The golden chain wove around their wand hands, collectively - though Sandy was good enough to offer a dainty golden palm without complaint, for the sake of the gesture. Pitch scoffed gently.

“Yes, yes… Well, it’s a start on a secret society, at least.”

“Oh! Can we name it something cool?” Jack asked.

They all thought hard, but it was North, looking up, who finally ventured a suggestion.

“What about the Lunatics?”

They all followed his gaze, and after a moment, another ripple of laughter went through them, their fingers brushing against each other’s. Maybe it was a kind of madness, this sort of lonely friendship.

“The Lunatics,” Tooth agreed. “First order of business… Dueling brackets. Partners are who finishes planting their bulbs.”

She watched as all five boys picked up their spades with renewed fervor, slinging dirt into the air as if they were possessed. Sometimes, she thought, it was good to be the brains of the outfit.

“Good talk, guys,” she giggled.


End file.
